Improvement of Solar Cells Efficiency by Response Surface Method based on Multivariate Analysis Models

Abstract

Response surface method based on multivariate analysis models is applied to search manufacturing conditions which improve conversion efficiency of Fuji Electric's newly developed thin film solar cells in its trial manufacturing. Difficulties in this problem include: 1. The manufacturing process has many condition parameters to determine, and design of experiments (DoE) is difficult to apply, 2. Obtained data contains lots of noise caused by fluctuation of properties in manufacturing apparatus under same condition settings. Sets of new methodologies have been developed to cope with these difficulties as follow: 1. Data pretreatment suitable for solar cell manufacturing process, 2. Response surface method using partial least squares with nonlinear term, 3. Optimization method searching within interpolation in multivariate search space and with correlations of variables kept.